The faltering government of the Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi struck back at mounting protests against his 40-year rule, as helicopters and warplanes besieged parts of the capital Monday, according to witnesses and news reports from Tripoli....Over the last three days Libyan security forces have killed at least 223 people, according to a tally by the group Human Rights Watch.

Qaddafi is carpet bombing his own people? Jesus Christ. His own diplomats are now disowning him, and not a moment too soon. More here, including an explainer and continuous updates.

Two quick hits today, both responding to posters at Outside the Beltway. First, Steven Taylor notes that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's union busting efforts are aimed only at some public sector unions, not all of them. This prompts a question aimed at Walker's allies:

If it is a fundamental principle that public sector employees ought not to have the right to collective bargaining, why are the police, firefighters and state troopers of Wisconsin not part of the package? Why does Governor Walker and his allies believe that those workers ought to be able to retain their collective bargaining rights?

....However, I would go beyond that and not ask why Walker is doing what Walker is doing, but rather ask why we have not seen (or, at least, I have not seen) his ideological allies calling for him to include police, firefighters and state troopers in the bill? If there is a fundamental philosophical issue here concerning public sector unions, what is the possible rationale for any exceptions?

I dunno. Any conservatives want to take a crack at this? Then, on the subject of pensions more generally, James Joyner reviews the sad state of 401(k) plans and says this:

The days of spending your life working for a company and then retiring in relative luxury on a generous pension are long gone. Part of that is union-busting, corporate greed, or whatever bugaboo you want to call it. Mostly, it’s a consequence of a global economy that is pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty but forcing people in the developed world to compete on a wage basis with those in the developing world. It’s great for Western investors and consumers but not so great for Western workers.

....We can’t rely on private companies, the stock market, or the taxpayers to maintain our lifestyle in our golden years. And not everyone can just keep on working, either. Nor do I advocate the Logan’s Run option. So, I haven’t the foggiest what to do about all this.

This is a pretty common reaction, but in fact, the arithmetic of decent pensions actually works out just fine. Corporations didn't give up on defined benefit pensions because they couldn't afford them any longer, they gave up on them because that allowed them to spend more money on executive salaries. After all, if overseas competition were really the big problem here, then you'd expect to have seen a long, steady decline in corporate profits and corporate compensation. But we haven't seen that. Profits have boomed and compensation has stayed high. The difference hasn't been in the level of compensation, it's been in the distribution of compensation. The executive suite has done fine. The rest of us haven't.

The federal government can spend money on social programs two ways: directly, via ordinary tax-funded programs (Medicare, food stamps, etc.) or indirectly, via tax expenditures (tax deductions for charitable contributions, employer health insurance, etc.). Christopher Faricy, a political science professor at Washington State, recently examined both types of spending over the past 40 years and concluded that the big spenders aren't who you think they are:

The traditional narrative of Democratic party control of the federal government resulting in higher levels of social spending needs to be reconsidered....Social spending over the last 40 years grows on average around 5% a year regardless of which political party is sitting in the majority.

....An increase in indirect social spending has the same budgetary effect as direct social spending. For example, an increase in tax expenditures for private health care insurance that costs the Treasury $100 million dollars has the exact same effect on the budget deficit as a newly proposed public health insurance option that is projected at $100 million dollars....One major implication of these findings is that the jurisdiction of social provision, not the financial effort, shifts with changes to political party control of government.

Republicans, it turns out, actually spend a bit more money on social programs than Democrats, as the green bars in the chart below show (click for a larger image). The main difference? Democrats spend it on direct programs that largely serve "the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, and the poor...ethnic minorities, racial minorities, and single mothers." Republicans spend it indirectly on programs that "are biased towards workers who are White, full-time, in large companies, and high-wage earners." But spend it they do.

I'm highlighting this not to pick on MB or to weigh in on charter schools. Nor even to weigh in on whether teachers unions should be friendlier toward charters. (I happen to think they should be, as long as charters aren't used as merely a sub rosa way of busting unions.) I'm highlighting it because it represents an all too common style of argument, which goes something like this:

Unions do (or support) X.

X is a bad thing.

Therefore unions are bad.

And (sometimes this is implicit, sometime explicit) they should be done away with.

Every single human institution or organization of any size has its bad points. Corporations certainly do. The military does. Organized religion does. Academia does. The media does. The financial industry sure as hell does. But with the exception of a few extremists here and there, nobody uses this as an excuse to suggest that these institutions are hopelessly corrupt and should cease existing. Rather, it's used as fodder for regulatory proposals or as an argument that every right-thinking person should fight these institutions on some particular issue. Corporations should or shouldn't be rewarded for outsourcing jobs. Academics do or don't deserve more state funding. The financial industry should or shouldn't be required to trade credit derivatives on public exchanges.

Unions are the most common big exception to this rule. Sure, conservatives will take whatever chance they can to rein them in, regulate them, make it nearly impossible for them to organize new workplaces. But they also routinely argue that labor unions simply shouldn't exist. This is what's happening in Wisconsin: Gov. Scott Walker isn't satisfied with merely negotiating concessions from public sector unions. He wants to effectively ban collective bargaining and all but do away with public sector unions completely.

Nobody should buy this. Of course unions have pathologies. Every big human institution does. And anyone who thinks they're on the wrong side of an issue should fight it out with them. But unions are also the only large-scale movement left in America that persistently acts as a countervailing power against corporate power. They're the only large-scale movement left that persistently acts in the economic interests of the middle class.

So sure: go ahead and fight the teachers unions on charter schools. Go ahead and insist that public sector unions in Wisconsin need to take pay and benefit cuts if that's what you believe. Go ahead and rail against Davis-Bacon. It's a free country.

But the decline of unions over the past few decades has left corporations and the rich with essentially no powerful opposition. No matter what doubts you might have about unions and their role in the economy, never forget that destroying them destroys the only real organized check on the power of the business community in America. If the last 30 years haven't made that clear, I don't know what will.

Lori Montgomery reported in The Post last week that a bipartisan group of senators thinks a sensible deficit reduction package would involve lifting the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reforming taxes, purportedly to raise revenue, in a way that would cut the top income tax rate for the wealthy from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Only a body dominated by millionaires could define "shared sacrifice" as telling nurses' aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don't get why Democrats — "the party of the people," I've heard — would come near such an idea.

Good question. Anybody know any Democrats who might be able to answer this?

A couple of years ago Pew Research surveyed news coverage of the economy during the first half of 2009. Who drove stories? Who got quoted in stories? The answer was pretty much what you'd expect: the president, the White House, business leaders, academics, politicians, and ordinary citizens. Do you notice anyone missing from this list? Pew did:

One subset of the American workforce was virtually shut out of the coverage entirely. Representatives of organized labor unions were sources in a mere 2% of all the economy stories studied.

But that was reporting about a financial crisis. Surely things would be different if the story dominating the news was specifically about a state governor's attempt to gut a union and the union's attempt to fight back? Eddie Vale, AFL-CIO political communications director, sets us straight:

While we appreciate coverage of this impt issue quite odd not a single union member or officer invited on any of the Sunday shows

Actually, not so odd at all. In fact, it's par for the course. Unless it's a story about how unions are ruining American education or destroying state pension funds, today's press isn't much interested in what they have to say.

More about this on Tuesday morning, when my piece in the current issue of MoJo about the decline of unions and the not-so-coincidental decline of American liberalism goes online.

So how big is Wisconsin's budget problem? And did Gov. Scott Walker help create it? Politifact takes a look at the numbers here and tells us.

Nickel version: the projections from the legislative analyst are necessarily subject to a bit of guesswork, but he estimates that Wisconsin will probably have a modest shortfall in the current fiscal year, amounting to about 1% of the total budget. In the two-year cycle after that, the legislative analyst estimates that tax collections will run $190 million below previous estimates. Nearly two-thirds of this revenue deterioration is due to legislation supported and signed by Walker during a special session he called last month.

Bottom line: Wisconsin's budget problems are fairly modest this year, but substantially larger in the two years after that despite the fact that tax revenues are projected to increase about 4% in both 2012 and 2013. However, whatever the size of the future deficit (which is still a point of dispute), revenues for 2012 are about 1% less than previously estimated thanks to Walker's special session bills. Walker isn't at fault for the current year's shortfall, but he is at fault for making the shortfall worse over the next two-year cycle.

Wisconsin's public sector workers have already taken a 3% cut in wages over the past two years. Maybe that's enough, maybe it isn't. But Walker has taken an already pressing problem, made it incrementally worse, and then used it not just as an excuse to bargain hard on wages and benefits, but as an excuse to gut Wisconsin's public unions entirely. (The Democratic-leaning ones, anyway.) It's just not a good faith exercise.

For more, check out Andy Kroll's explainer here, and be sure to scroll down for the updates. Andy's on the ground in Madison right now and you can follow his Twitter feed here.

UPDATE: The original draft of this post underestimated the size of Wisconsin's future deficits. I've corrected the text to more accurately reflect the legislative analyst's estimates. The most recent estimates from the state budget director are here.

Michael O'Hare weighs in today on the value of public funding for the arts, and although I think we're still talking past each other to some extent, he concludes with a passage that I thoroughly endorse:

Probably the most costly program of government support for the arts, and in my view the most important and the one whose ongoing collapse is the most pernicious, is arts education in the schools. Parental introduction to the arts is the largest correlate of lifetime consumption, but government obviously isn’t in that business. Engagement in school is next. Hands-on and historical education in the arts — both are important — is critical to lifetime access to the cultural patrimony of a country or the whole world, and it’s another real market failure, information asymmetry.

People who can enjoy different, challenging experiences that make them smarter instead of dumber and alert instead of bored, have better lives than people who don’t. But the arts require some investment (though they tend to be beneficially addictive if you just step on the escalator) and pay off richly for accumulated experience. “I’m glad I don’t like opera, because if I did, I’d listen to it, and I hate the stuff!” is the suboptimal stable state a society can help its citizens get out of, and school is the place where it can happen.

I don't know how deeply arts education has been slashed in our public schools, but anecdotal evidence suggests it's been slashed pretty deeply on the twin altars of budget cuts and high-stakes testing. This is, I think, a tremendous loss for society, and it's a loss regardless of whether government agencies should overtly subsidize any particular medium or form of art in the adult sphere. If kids don't learn to appreciate art, then art will inevitably decline, and that makes us all poorer. After all, who wants to live in a world without art?

I'd like to be able to say that Inkblot and Domino are firm supporters of the labor action currently unfolding in Wisconsin, but I'm afraid that would be a bit of a stretch. As you can see, they've already negotiated a pretty good deal for themselves, and collective action isn't really in their nature. So we humans are on our own.

But speaking of cats, I'm pleased to report that 10 Downing Street once again has an official cat. Why? Because, it turns out, 10 Downing Street also has a few official rats. So they brought in Larry. Picture and story here.

Speaking of my upcoming piece for the magazine, one of its major themes is the postwar decline of private-sector unions in America, culminating in the annus horribilis of 1978, which one business historian called "Waterloo" for organized labor. (Why? You'll have to read the story to learn more! It'll be online Tuesday and it comes with lots of nifty charts and illustrations, like the one on the right.) Today, Greg Sargent says 2011 could be much the same for public sector unions:

As I laid out here yesterday, this is only one of many national proposals being pushed by state governments across the country designed to achieve similarly transformative changes in that relationship between public workers and government.

Pro-labor and anti-labor people I've spoken with in recent days both agree that a defeat in Wisconsin could make it easier for other similar initiatives to advance. One anti-union activist I spoke to yesterday made it clear that if labor loses here, anti-union forces will point to the defeat to stiffen the spines of other GOP-controlled governments who are eyeing similarly transformative efforts but might be wary of a battle on the scale of the one unfolding in Wisconsin. This is just the beginning.

I won't pretend to be the world's most full-throated defender of public sector unions. If I could trade ten points of union density in the private sector for ten points in the public sector, I'd take the trade in a heartbeat. But that is, obviously, not the trade on offer. Nor is what's happening in Wisconsin merely hard bargaining during tough economic times. That would be understandable. Rather, it's an effort to destroy one of the few institutions left that fights relentlessly for the economic interests of the middle class. That's why conservatives oppose unions of all kinds, both public and private, and regardless of their faults, that's why they deserve our support.